Books like

Books like The Metamorphosis

12 books with a reading profile close to The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

The Tartar Steppe

by Dino Buzzati

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Giovanni Drogo, a young officer, is posted to the Bastiani Fortress, an isolated outpost on the northern frontier overlooking a barren plain.
2

Rubāʻīyāt

by Omar Khayyam

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

This 1870 edition presents a collection of quatrains attributed to the eleventh-century Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam, translated into English verse by Edward FitzGerald.
3

One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Vitangelo Moscarda, a man of comfortable means who has inherited a bank from his father, is told by his wife that his nose is crooked.
4

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

In Algiers, a clerk named Meursault receives news of his mother’s death and attends her funeral with complete emotional detachment.
5

Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

A magistrate runs a small frontier town in an unnamed empire.
6

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

A cynical protagonist, convinced that nothing in the universe possesses objective value, decides to commit suicide.
7

Medea

by Euripides

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Euripides depicts the psychological collapse and subsequent vengeance of Medea, a Colchian princess abandoned by her husband, Jason.
8

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Gustav von Aschenbach, a disciplined German writer who has prioritized rigorous intellect over sensory pleasure, travels to Venice to escape a creative drought.
9

Poems by John Keats

by John Keats

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

John Keats’s debut collection, published in March 1817 rather than 1800, organizes lyrical meditations on the restorative capacity of the natural world and the permanence of classical mythology.
10

Bartleby the Scrivener

by Herman Melville

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

Set in a mid-nineteenth-century Wall Street law office, the story follows an elderly lawyer who hires a quiet copyist named Bartleby to manage an increasing workload.
11

Songs of innocence and of experience

by William Blake

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary

William Blake’s hand-colored collection contrasts two differing states of the human soul.
12

Alcestis

by Euripides

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

In this tragedy, King Admetus is granted a reprieve from his impending death on the condition that someone else dies in his place.

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